


Pistol for a Mouth (the Perpetual Survivor Remix)

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, F/M, M/M, Minor Character(s), Pre-Canon, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 04:00:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1331110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>”Well? How do I look?” He stood in front of her and fisted his hands atop his hips, and Liesel immediately covered her mouth. </p>
<p>Coal dust smeared him black head-to-toe, except for a bare patch that shaped the number “12” on his chest. She drew closer, whispering, “Rudy, it’s even in your ears!” [Hunger Games AU.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pistol for a Mouth (the Perpetual Survivor Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Liesel/Rudy, AU setting](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/40855) by romanitas. 



> A remix of [this 3-sentence ficbit](http://romanitas.tumblr.com/post/76203455158/for-your-meme-liesel-rudy-for-any-au-setting-youve) that [Tomato](http://archiveofourown.org/users/romanitas) wrote me for a meme back in February. Originally, in one great fit of "how DARE you", I planned on writing her a 3-sentence ficbit as payback. Three sentences then became 21k, as happens.
> 
> Knowledge of both canons is highly encouraged. Familiarity with the minor characters from both canons is also highly encouraged, since a lot of them make an appearance.
> 
> **Warnings** for **character death** on both a Hunger Games AND a Book Thief level. Explicit depictions of grief, nonexplicit depictions of violence. References to reproductive coercion and oppressive totalitarian tactics.
> 
> Can be read here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/124741.html).

*

 

 

_"Katniss?" Peeta says. I meet his eyes, knowing my face must be some shade of green. He mouths the words. "How about that kiss?"_  
\- The Hunger Games, p. 257

 

 

*

 

On Sundays, when the mines were closed, Liesel’s papa would take his accordion and they would go for a walk along the perimeter. The fence, always kept to their right, hummed with electricity -- on hot days, it even seemed to vibrate at the air. By the time they reached the meadow, Rudy Steiner would have joined them, and Papa would pick a spot in the grass to sit. The rest of the afternoon was usually lost like that, Liesel and Rudy kicking a ball back and forth while Papa's music meandered between them.

It was during one of these outings, when Liesel was probably about ten years old, that Rudy asked a question.

“Herr Hubermann,” ventured out of him. His voice stepped through the grass.

Papa, trying to light his cigarette, which wasn’t sticking together well in the humidity, glanced over at him and returned in like, “Herr Steiner.” You have to love Liesel’s papa for that -- calling someone a “Herr” or a “Frau” was what Liesel’s mama called “merchant-class rubbish, what useless trash, why do they have to keep reminding us just how _different_ they are from us,” like Liesel wasn’t sitting right there, with red cheeks and merchant-class hair.

When she asked Rudy, he scrunched his face up and shrugged, like it wasn’t something he’d ever thought of before. Liesel supposed it was like how sometimes in the Hunger Games there’d be tributes from District 5 who’d forget and end each other’s names with “-san” the way other people would _start_ a person’s name with “Mr.” or “Mrs.”, or in Rudy’s case, “Herr” or “Frau.” The Hunger Games were the only time Liesel got to see anything in regards to the other Districts, and she thought it was fascinating. Where did these words come from?

Rudy dropped into the grass at Papa’s side. He asked, with great curiosity, “Did you fight in the Rebellion?”

The cigarette finally lit. The end glowed and the paper crackled. Papa dragged at it until it tasted better, watching both of them.

“I did,” he answered. “I wasn’t very good at it, though. Of course,” a chuckle scraped out of him. “I’m not very good at mining, either, but I don’t have much of a choice about that.”

They laughed with him, as children do, understanding without quite understanding at all. 

 

*

 

The very first person to win the Hunger Games -- the inaugural one thrown together before the ink on the Treaty of Treason had completely dried -- was a girl from District 7. Her name was Victorie, and to this day, she’s the reason why winners are always called “Victors.” There was a rhyming scheme and all, some little ditty Capitol children put together that caught on.

Liesel was only two years old when the first Hunger Games happened. She didn’t remember it -- and to be honest, by the time she learned to be afraid of them, they’d already been going on for several years. Grow up with a misery like that, and you don’t really see it so much. 

She remembered standing, cold and wet and holding on to her brother’s hand, there at her mother’s side in front of the town hall. Those were her first memories of the Hunger Games. There were too many legs in the way and she couldn’t see the screen, and she didn't complain, because there was some inkling in her that her mother was deliberately sparing her from something. She remember Werner coughing. Those memories are always linked for some reason: the Hunger Games and her brother’s cough.

The year Werner died was the year that girl from District 4, Magdova Merandes, won and came to 12 on her Victory Tour.

She told Mags about that, after. “The first time I saw you was the last time I saw my brother,” and Mags looked at her so somberly that Liesel felt the weight of it in her chest like rocks.

 

*

 

“You’re lucky he died,” Ludwig Schmiekl told her in the schoolyard. “At least now you won’t have to take out tesserae just to feed him.”

The sound in Liesel’s ears turned to static.

Next thing she knew, he was on his back and she had her knees in his armpits. She held him to the ground and beat at him until she felt his teeth give underneath her fists.

She might have kept going if the teachers didn’t arrive at that very moment to pull her off; Rudy already hovered nearby, spouting off in her defense. There was too much supervision, she thought fiercely, she couldn’t even defend her brother without somebody coming along and telling her she shouldn’t.

 

*

 

Two years after Liesel’s own Games, Ludwig Schmiekl’s name got called at the Reaping. Max took one look at the expression on her face and murmured, too low for the microphones, “Do you want me to take this one?”

She already knew the answer. “No, I’ll mentor him. You’re better with the younger ones anyway, so you’d best look after the girl.”

Liesel was seventeen. So was Ludwig. She could beat him in the schoolyard, but she couldn’t teach him how to be a killer. Liesel Meminger couldn’t teach anybody how to be a killer, that was the problem: it would be almost forty years before District 12 saw another Victor.

They didn’t tell you that before you won. They didn’t tell you that you’d have to deal with families like the Schmiekls, who watch you with eyes that say, _You won. You survived. How come the child I entrusted to you didn’t? What are you doing wrong?_

What are you doing wrong?

"It's really very clever," said Liesel brightly, at some point. The beetle-black eye of the camera watched her unblinkingly. She imagined the editors with their fingers poised, ready to cut away from her. She wouldn't give them any warning -- she never did. "It gets everybody to blame their Victors, instead of the people _actually_ responsible for the deaths of their children -- which, of course, is you."

 

*

 

For all that Districts like 1, 2, and 4 got the credit later for being the Career Districts, the number of Victors per District was pretty evenly skewed there in the beginning. Districts 1 and 2 were hardest hit by the Rebellion, due to their proximity to the Capitol, and simply didn’t have the resources then to train the brutes they’d later be famous for.

Victorie Heavensbee of 7 won the 1st Hunger Games. She was very tall, had skin so black it looked almost blue in some lights, and she could lift her own body weight and settle it across her shoulders. She had eyes that stared out of her head in smears of midnight color. She appeared to be everything you could want in a Victor, and there were even some people in the Capitol who looked forward to the 2nd Hunger Games, not to satisfy some need to see the Districts punished, but just to see who'd win.

Then Max Vandenburg of 12 became Panem’s second Victor, and, looking back on it, that was probably when things started to go wrong.

 

*

 

In the wings before the recap, Liesel couldn’t keep her composure. She pressed her head against the wall and drew her shoulders up so tight she felt like a crow. Sobs shuddered out of her, no matter how she kept her hands sealed over her mouth. 

Her face felt smeared and wet. Had they done her make-up? Surely they did, and now it was ruined.

They must have gotten somebody to fetch Max, because he arrived with a touch to her elbow, rearranging his footing automatically when she tensed.

He’d never dealt with a Victor this long before, since he was the only one District 12 had until now, but when she glanced at him sideways and said, between the helpless, shuddering contractions of her lungs, “They’re going to ask me about Rudy, how can I talk to them about Rudy, how can they be so cruel, how can they,” his eyes folded with such kindness.

He gripped her elbow, pulling until she turned away from the safety of the wall.

“I’m going to give you one more weapon,” he said, in that subterranean voice. Max Vandenburg always spoke like he was coming from underground, quiet and peculiar. “Are you listening?”

She nodded.

“When somebody tries to control you, when somebody tries to control every aspect of your life, then everything you do becomes an act of rebellion,” his voice painted across her. She pictured it coloring her in until she was a human shade again. “Tell me, Liesel, can you sing?”

Somehow, it didn’t seem like a strange question at all. “Not usually without my Papa’s accordion.”

“Do you think you could sing with me? At least until we get back to your father?” They held onto each other’s forearms, and she more watched Max's mouth form the words than heard him say them. Upstairs, she could hear them prepping the presenter, testing the mic over the settling sound of the live audience. They've played the recap in front of the Victor since the very first Games: Liesel couldn't get out of it, no matter what. She had to see them all die again.

"Why?"

Max smiled. "What do you think will make them angriest? They punch you here," he touched his own teeth. "They punch you here," his heart, this time. "So what can you do? You sing. Every time they try to make you hurt, you sing -- or, like Mr. Hubermann, make music wherever you can. They're scared of it, Liesel. They don't know what to do."

One of Liesel's gravediggers reappeared, a fresh palette of make-up balanced on his hand. He held up his brush to Liesel's cheek, contemplated it, then returned it to the palette to mix it into something beiger.

"They are not the Victors here," Max said, quieter still. "They will never be Victors. You are, and what do we do at the sight of victory? We sing."

She took a deep breath and held onto him tighter. "What do we both know?"

 

*

 

As a child, Liesel almost never saw him. Except for the Reapings (and, consequently, the funerals) every year, she never had any reason to pay attention to Max Vandenburg's existence, although she thought one of his cousins might have been in the midget class with her at school, before they got relocated.

After his victory, he lived with his family in the Seam until they completed construction on the Victor's Village -- rows of gorgeous, postwar housing that Liesel and Werner would sometimes go gawk at through the gates as they were being built, imagining what it would be like to live there, as rich as Capitol citizens. When they finished and Max gently refused to move in, the Capitol responded by moving his family to another District.

The first time Liesel ever remembered seeing him was actually on television, which seemed strange to her in hindsight, because District 12 wasn't that big.

She was on the rug with a piece of coal, tracing letters on a slate while her Papa tinkered with his accordion and the television blared the Capitol anthem above their heads. They had it on because the television always had to be on when the Hunger Games were happening. They were just filling airtime, anyway -- everyone in the arena must have been sleeping, or otherwise not being very entertaining -- but she remembered, because President Summers was on screen, talking to one of the Victors.

"You know," he said, with a quelling gesture at somebody laughing off-camera. President Summers talked with his hands: they were big hands, flat and square like shovels, ready to bury. "I quite like a good fistfight myself."

"Do you?" the Victor replied.

Liesel looked up, saw a young man with a nest of brambles and loose feathers for hair. Max Vandenburg won his crown with a lucky fistfight.

"Well," he said. With the canniness of a child, she understood something about the thin sickle that formed his smile, the way he leaned in. "Perhaps we should box sometime, then, _Fuhrer."_

The audience roared with delight, as audiences do. Even the president grinned, and behind her, Papa chuckled. The sound of it scraped out of him like coal dust. 

Liesel gave him a curious look, but all he said was, "That's my boy."

 

*

 

Liesel Meminger was fourteen years old when they called her name at the Reaping. By the time she went into the arena, she would be fifteen.

On the stage, Dolphine Heinrich folded the slip of paper in two. _She pronounced my name wrong,_ Liesel thought. She said it the way Capitol people do, so that it rhymed with "basil," not "lee-sill." _Does that mean I can claim it's not me. It's not my name if she can't say it right._

The girls on either side of Liesel drew away in the same moment, their realization simultaneous -- as if her being a tribute could be contagious, like death sentences could be transmitted by touch. Liesel wished they wouldn't. Nothing drew the attention of a camera like the ripple of a crowd singling a person out, and she needed the moment to compose herself.

She touched her hair, just to be sure. She could already hear Mama complaining, "Years of wrestling that girl's miserable hair into shape, and the one day she lets it out is the day the whole country sees it!", but the pins were solidly in place. She touched the buttons of her uniform. She pulled at her skirt. The sun sat hot on her scalp with a physical weight, and when she looked up, she couldn't see Frau Heinrich on stage anymore. She blinked the burnt, black spots out of her eyes.

Her legs rattled underneath her when she separated them from the hot ground. Then, horribly --

Someone cried out.

It was a single dismayed, involuntary wail. A woman's voice, coming from the last place Liesel expected. 

She stepped out of the paddock, trembling, now in clear view of everybody, and imagined Papa's long arm pinning Mama to his side, keeping her upright. They would not collapse for the cameras. They would not give the Capitol viewers that satisfaction. She didn't dare look. She didn't know Mama could sound like that.

By the time she reached the stage, someone else had started crying; soft, childish whimpers, clearly audible.

Liesel touched her cheeks, but no, it wasn't her. She looked left, then right, scanning until she spotted the culprit in the crowd, pressed against her mother's knees: Bettina Steiner, her curls sticking to her wet face.

She knew, in that moment, exactly what was going to happen next.

"No!" blurted out of her. The microphone caught it and it echoed, startling the birds out of the eaves of the Justice Building and clapping them against the sky. 

Dolphine, her hand in the bowl of male tribute slips, stopped and looked over, as surprised as the birds. "Don't let him do it!" Liesel told her, balling her fists up.

She looked at the boys, finding Rudy easily by the color of his hair. He stared straight ahead, shoulders drawn up and chest extended like he'd gulped down a big breath and forgotten to let it go.

When Dolphine stepped back to the microphone and read, "Tomas Muller," Rudy didn't even hesitate. 

He stepped straight forward, walking out of the paddock as stiff and straight as if it was a drill. Nobody tried to stop him, not even when Liesel cried out again, and then somehow he was on stage with her. His hair combed back, his shirt ironed and neat -- of course it was, his parents ran the tailor's shop on Merchant Street -- and when he caught her eye, he smiled at her, as naturally as if he was coming to fetch her for a game in the Meadow. Rudy Steiner, her best friend, the eternal stepper-inner.

"Tomas?" asked Frau Heinrich.

"No," said Rudy. The real Tommy Muller was still in the paddock, twitching, his face spasming. His little sister, Kristina, had worked her way forward from the back and gripped his arms in her hands very tightly, the way she did when he had a seizure in class. "I'm Rudolf Steiner. I'll be going as tribute in Tommy's place, thank you."

"Oh," burbled out of the Capitol woman.

Volunteers were allowed, of course -- they'd all just had the rules read to them, so it was still fresh in their minds. It's just that nobody had ever done it before, not in any District. Why would you? Why would anyone _want_ to go get killed for the entertainment of the Capitol?

_Because Rudy Steiner is a dummkompf and an idiot,_ Liesel thought, and glared at him. She wanted to push him off the stage. She wanted his parents to come up here and take him back.

But when the Capitol wants your children, you aren't supposed to say no.

Frau Heinrich recovered, making a show of accepting Rudy's honorable sacrifice before turning to the watching crowd of District 12 and announcing their newest tributes for the 13th Annual Hunger Games, Liesel Meminger and Rudolf Steiner! What a Games this will be!

 

*

 

When they let her say good-bye to her family in that small, stately room in the Justice Building, Mama came through the door first, bullying Liesel up into the hardest embrace she'd ever received, squeezing her so tightly Liesel couldn't even suck down air to speak, much less sob. Mama gave her two bruising pounds between the shoulder blades, swaying her and muttering, "We should never have let you take out that tessarae. What were we _thinking,_ letting you do that?"

"I had to," Liesel said blankly.

Her first memories of coming to live with the Hubermanns largely consisted of Mama trying to scrub entire layers of her skin off in the same metal tub she used for the washing. She said she was trying to get the coal dust out, and she might have been right: the whole District was caked in the stuff, and Liesel'd never bothered much with bathing before. _I don't know what that swine was thinking, volunteering to take you in,_ she frequently took the opportunity to mutter, beating at Liesel's head and shoulders. _You're not making us any money, you filthy pig, and there's precious little to feed us with as it is._

When Liesel turned twelve, she went and put her name down for tessarae, the way she'd seen Rudy do a few months before. 

There hadn't been any deliberation about it. She certainly hadn't asked for permission. You were Seam, you were starving, so you signed up for tessarae and upped your odds of going into the Games. The threat of having her name drawn at the Reaping wasn't nearly as immediate as the empty soup pot sitting on the stove at home.

Stupid.

A horrible thought occurred to her, and she clung to Mama's shirt. "Who's going to get you the grain and oil now?" she got out. "Once I'm dead, how are you --"

Rosa bruised her again, making the rest of her sentence pop into a squeak. She shushed her, and behind her, Papa's voice rumbled out, heavy as river rock, "Don't worry about us, Liesel."

So Liesel clutched at Rosa for as long as the woman's strength lasted, and then her mama pulled away, checking the pins in Liesel's hair and saying, "Now, then, you just remember --" before losing her ability to speak altogether, like she was the one who'd been bruised airless. Bafflingly, she just pulled Liesel into her and kissed the top of her head, and then she bustled out of the room.

It left her alone with Papa, and that, somehow, was even worse.

He held her by the shoulders, occasionally lifting his hands, blackened with coal around the cuticles and smelling like tobacco, to stroke her hair, effectively messing up Mama's hard work with the pins. His eyes, swollen with kindness, started to tarnish under the weight of tears. Liesel felt like her ribs were being pulled from her, one-by-one: a hopeless, tight stretching feeling in her chest.

He didn't say anything, because what was there to say? Liesel Meminger was fourteen years old. Her chest was still flat, she hadn't yet bled. She didn't have any advantages except she knew how to starve. 

She wasn't coming home, and the people in this room who knew that numbered two.

She choked, still airless, and tried to think of something to say.

What would she say, she thought, if their roles were reversed? If it was Papa about to get on a train, to be taken to some training center and then thrown into an arena to die?

"Take care of Mama," stumbled out of her, and she gasped and hiccuped with the effort it took. "You know she isn't as strong as she looks. Keep playing the accordion in the Meadow, for Rudy's brothers and sisters." Another gasp, another horrible thought: she was never going to see her home again, not the soup or the washing basin or the accordion or -- "and -- and -- take care of my books. Don't sell them, please don't sell them, please --"

"Oh, Liesel."

Papa did hug her then, embracing her very hard and murmuring "my girl, my _girl"_ into her hair, and she buried her face against his chest until the Peacekeepers came and it was time to go.

 

*

 

She buried her mother in the coldest month of winter. 

It snowed all of the previous night and most of the morning, coating everything with a dry whiteness so light and powdery it could be swept away with a broom. As was traditional, Liesel took the shovel proffered to her and broke the ground over the new grave. Rosa Hubermann's plot was marked with tape, six feet of space next to her husband.

Pages from the gravedigger's handbook kept flickering across the surface of her eyelids whenever she closed them, and she found herself murmuring instructions under her breath, the words she so eagerly learned tucked up warmly under her quilt while Papa nodded off in the chair, _Chapter Six, in the event of snow …_ Her throat ached like someone had hollowed it out.

Others joined her after a respectful amount of time, and when it was done, Liesel kissed the three middle fingers of her left hand and pressed it to the Hubermanns' gravestone.

The tears were frozen on her face. She was sixteen years old.

 

*

 

After, she sat in her house in the Victor's Village, uncertain what to do.

Max sat across from her, and Barbara Steiner moved about the kitchen, filling the hollow belly of a kettle with water, so they'd have hot water bottles for their hands and feet. In the northern-most parts of District 11, they would sew kernels of corn into scrap fabric and heat them over a fire. The kernels, which had been treated with something to keep them from popping, held the warmth for a long time. They tucked them into their coats and their gloves before heading out into a frostbitten morning. The people of District 11 spent a lot of time outdoors.

She kept rising, thinking that she should be doing something, offering them coffee or food, but nobody was letting her.

"Oh, no, stay there, Liesel, we'll get it," they said. It was as if they expected her hands to be too full of grief, her back broken with the weight of it.

She sat, putting her hands over her knees, which were bony and cold and jittering.

"I never asked," she said abruptly. Her voice landed at Max Vandenburg's feet. "Where did they send your family after your Games?"

Max, who'd lifted his head at the sound of her voice, glanced away. She studied the profile this presented to her -- he looked Seam, but in the same hodge-podge way she did, like bits and pieces of Seam identity had been patched inexpertly into them. Liesel's mixed-race hair gave her away, and for Max, it was his eyes; swampy green, like woodland. His father had been Capitol, she recalled, a defector who joined the rebel's side in the Uprising. His widow and son managed to escape to District 12 before the war was lost and the fences became electrified, to live with a sister here.

He swallowed and said, "I wasn't informed. The notice of their placement had apparently," his eyes darted helplessly. "Gotten lost."

"Oh," said Liesel. Her hands fisted on her kneecaps. "That's cruel. At least I'll always know where my parents are. And my brother. And Rudy."

His eyes landed on her with the weight of a bird, hopping as she added each name to the list. He sucked in air like it hurt, like he ached for her, and for a long moment, they just sat there, breathing with their Victor lungs.

"Yes," came out of him at last, dry and sandpapery. "Lucky you."

 

*

 

In those very first Games, the arena was exactly that: an arena, not unlike the Training Center in its build and execution. 

The 1st Hunger Games had, after all, come together in little under three months, and they held it in a coliseum in the Capitol that had, on previous occasions, been used for sporting events or celebrity appearances. The tributes were pitted against each other in a series of qualifying rounds; quarterfinals, semifinals, and whoever managed to survive each round went on to the next, until there were only two tributes left for a final showdown. They were provided with weapons and water, but no food, and battles were often brutally short. 

Victorie Heavensbee powered her way through and set the standard for every Victor that would come after her.

This meant that as a tribute, Max Vandenburg was unimpressive. 

As a Victor, he was downright disappointing.

"Only if you're Capitol," the District 8 Victor told them loyally, after the commenters made some crack about Max and Liesel's tributes in the arena that year, who were young and underfed and Seam; uninspiring, like mentor, like tribute. She lowered her voice. "It was different for us in the Districts."

When Max went into the arena at age seventeen, spindly and seemingly made of matchsticks trying to be limbs, he wasn't strong or fast. He wasn't very masculine. He never would be.

And there was something humiliating about the way he talked. He _begged._ You weren't supposed to beg in the Hunger Games. You were there to perform, to provide revenue for the Capitol economy, to appease the Capitol merchants, artisans, and businessmen that they had nothing to fear from District competition, and you couldn't very well be entertaining if you didn't accept that script.

Max discomfited viewers by how easily he could shame them.

By the 10th Hunger Games, the arenas had become more terrain-based. The viewers liked that much better, watching tributes battle obstacles as well as each other, and the Capitol coffers had swelled enough post-Rebellion that it could afford to build arenas outside its mountains, so that every year there was a different arena with different terrain to face. These new Games provided more of an opportunity for an underdog to win, and oh, how the Capitol loved an underdog story. After all, how do you think they viewed themselves, the one little city-state that won against thirteen barbarian Districts?

When Liesel and Rudy's Games came, Max Vandenburg had already buried ten years of tributes. You could see them on his shoulders, the weight of them.

"So," said Rudy, during the train ride. He'd sequestered himself in a chair by the window, crunching through an apple, biting off chunks and dipping them into a tureen of some kind of off-gold sauce that Frau Heinrich had called "caramel." He still wore the ragged remains of his bravado hiked up around his shoulders. 

Liesel, for the most part, had lost the desire to scream herself hoarse at him, at the unfairness of it. It was too late now, anyway.

Rudy continued, chipping out his words as crisply as he was biting them off the apple, "What's with sponsors? Frau Heinrich said something about it."

"I think you can just call her Dolphine," Max pointed out, picking up a few pinions of hair off his forehead and dumping them sideways. He studied them. "Nobody's going to know what 'Frau' means in the Capitol anyway."

Rudy shrugged.

"Anyway," said Max again. "Sponsors are Capitol corporations, or very rich individuals, who pay to interfere on your behalf in the Games."

Eventually, of course, sponsorship will be so common that it would be almost impossible to win the Hunger Games without it. But not yet.

"Why would anyone want to do that?"

"It makes the Games more interactive. Makes the viewers feel like they've got the ability to control who will be Victor." A pause. "That will be my job, if you want me. To get you sponsors, I mean."

For the first time since he entered the compartment, Liesel spoke up. "Would you do that?"

Max's eyes twitched to her. He considered the question for a long time. Someone in his arena had called him a rat, she recalled suddenly, and that was how it caught on: the filthy rats from District 12. It was in the compulsive, nervous movements of his hands.

He came to a conclusion eventually, and when he spoke, it was in that deep cellar of a voice. "I would punch Death in the face for coming near either of you." 

And to her great surprise, Liesel felt the muscles in her back relax. She trusted that statement, she thought, more than anything else he could have said. He won without a weapon, after all, just his fists: he drove Enocha Wendella of 2's nose straight up into her brain. They mentioned it at every recap.

"Yeah?" That was Rudy, sounding interested. "Does that work?"

The corner of Max Vandenburg's mouth tore. "I think you'll find that Death has a habit of punching back."

 

*

 

For symbolism's sake, they hosted the first Quarter Quell in the same coliseum that hosted the very first Hunger Games, inside the Capitol. 

It was a culturally significant spot even before the Uprising, and opening the arena to include the warren of tunnels underneath the coliseum, the backstage rooms, kitchens, and utility rooms made the Quarter Quell one of the most wildly popular Games to that point and for several years afterward: the sight of tributes hunting each other through racks of spare costumes and in stainless steel industrial kitchens, all familiar to the Capitol viewers, was simply too _exciting._

That was also the year the Districts were required to choose which tributes they were going to sacrifice to the Games.

By popular vote, Liesel Meminger was selected to sing the national anthem at the opening ceremonies, after the presentation of the tributes. 

She required no accompaniment and no alteration or auto-tuning embedded in the microphone pinned to the front of her dress: when she sang, everyone fell silent out of respect, even the babes in arms. She'd learned it in school, everyone did, but to Liesel, the anthem was more personal. She remembered her papa playing it on his accordion sometimes during the Games. To drown it out, she supposed.

As she sang, she studied the tributes assembled before her.

For some, like the tributes from 1, 2, and 4, it was obvious to see why they'd been chosen. They were lean, athletic, well-fed: their Districts sent them in because they genuinely stood a chance of winning. There was a rumor that kids like that had been trained (secretly, of course,) the same way they'd later be trained for a career in their District specialty. For children in the Districts, the Games might as well be their career. Better them going in on a volunteer basis than some twelve-year-old with no chance at all.

Others clearly had been picked as mercy kills. Two or three could barely stand up, they were so sick; the girl from District 6 muffled a shaking, hacking cough into the elbow of her costume, like she was afraid she might interrupt Liesel if she didn't. At the very least, in the Capitol they'd get a good meal and get a chance to wear something fun before they died.

In District 12, there hadn't been any voting. They did it by lottery, the way the Capitol did. Only they'd ignored how many tickets each child was supposed to have according to their age and the Tessarae Act: one slip of paper for every person. Just one. To make it fair, for once.

The unlucky tributes agreed to lie, though, if asked, which they most certainly were going to be. To say something about how some relative had been a rebel and the Districts had no use for those; something the Capitol would eat up without question.

At the banquet following the presentation, the mayor of Denver Heights (a smaller, suburban town on the Capitol outskirts) found her hiding behind a rose-colored crystal sculpture of a bumblebee.

"Liesel," was handed over to her, as warm as a struck match. "Darling girl, you were wonderful."

Liesel smiled and took the hands extended to her. "Thank you, Mrs. Hermann. I was honored that they chose a District singer this year."

"I think," she drew Liesel close to her, tucking their hands against her side. "With this year being a Quell year, you'll find that everything will be focused on the Districts in a way they've never been before."

Liesel shivered. None of the tributes this year remembered a time when there _weren't_ Hunger Games.

Then again, neither did she, she supposed.

"I wonder what kind of stories we'll hear this year," was what she said instead.

Ilsa Hermann smiled. She was a slight, elderly lady in a midnight-colored velvet dress that trailed at her heels. Ropes of pearls cascaded down her front, and her long plait of silver hair was, as far as Liesel knew, its own natural color. Mayors, including the ones in the Districts, were voted in by some special cabinet in the Capitol, and nobody had yet seen a reason to vote Ilsa Hermann out. 

She very rarely spoke, and when she did, it was to offer seemingly idle pieces of observation, as she did now. 

"See that man there?" she said, gesturing across the ballroom with an elegant wave. Liesel stretched her neck and pinpointed a politician in an electric blue suit, laughing with the Gamemakers. He was a very attractive fellow about Liesel's age, and he wore in his lapel a strikingly perfect white rose. She nodded, and Ilsa Hermann said, "Coriolanus Snow. Don't trust him."

"Yes, Mrs. Hermann."

They walked until the crowd thinned out, somewhere on an outside veranda that overlooked a vast, sprawling hedge maze. (It would provide inspiration for next year's arena, a labyrinth with horrific Gamemaker traps waiting in the dead ends.) There were cameras out here, surely, but nobody cared about the movements of a tiny, toothless District 12 Victor and the mayor of some inconsequential town.

"Do you have any stories for me, my dear?" Ilsa Hermann asked.

Liesel did. Carefully, she worked her hand along the bottom of her corset, until she found a small tear along the seam. Easily, she widened it until she could slip her fingers inside and remove the pages of paper she'd hidden there, undetectable against the whalebone stiffness that shaped her bodice. She handed them over, explaining each page as Ilsa lifted it, "That one's from District 5, and there are two from 8." District 8 was District 12's closest neighbor, an industrial District that evolved out of a metropolis that sat on the shores of what was once a collection of five enormous lakes, and so was the easiest to get information from. Several of Liesel's neighbors in the Seam could trace their heritage back there, and every family had some story that resonated with them.

District 8 and District 9 were often considered sister-Districts, as they resembled each other and performed similar industries: taking raw product from Districts 1, 4, 10, 11, and 12 and processing them through endless factories, refineries, and plants so that a finished, packaged product could be delivered to Capitol shelves.

"And this?"

"From District 11. They tell it to children to help them remember the life stages of the cotton plant and its relatives."

Ilsa's mouth lifted, smile spreading as if it'd been given wings. She tucked the pages away like they were precious.

"What is it," she asked, "that your mentor calls you?"

Liesel smiled back. "Max calls me a lot of things, Frau Hermann," she said. And then, "Word-shaker. I -- he -- he calls me word-shaker."

 

*

 

During the 13th Hunger Games, exactly one person approached Max Vandenburg and offered to sponsor his tributes. 

There was only enough for one gift and one gift only, but it was so perfectly planned, so perfectly timed, that Liesel had no doubt that it played as key a role in her survival as Rudy did.

They tore down her arena eventually, needing the space for newer, bigger, and more exciting Games, but some of the most relevant pieces from the 13th Hunger Games wound up in a museum. Liesel even visited it once, when she was in town for an especially drawn-out Games, long after her own tributes had been boxed away in pine, waiting to be shipped back to District 12.

It was a small exhibit -- not much had survived the blast. Some flora, some terrain samples. There was the rapier Franz Deutcher used to kill his way through most of the other tributes, and Liesel's throat worked hard, unable to forget the sight of it between Rudy's ribs. Viktor Chemmel's teeth, carefully preserved. Esper's District token, a shoal map made of fishbone.

And, of course, the gas mask that Ilsa Hermann and Max Vandenburg sent her in a silver parachute. There was even a little placard behind the glass, pointing out the special feature that would sound off a cuckoo alarm in her ear if any bombs were detected nearby.

It looked so small, lying there. Child-sized.

Most sponsors, Liesel found out, parted with their money because they wanted some piece of you. They wanted to own you and your victory, so that it became more about _them_ and what _they_ did and less about your District.

And sometimes … sometimes they were Ilsa Hermann.

After the recap of her Games, they whisked her off to a celebratory dinner, held to honor her, the Gamemakers, and any particularly generous sponsors. She met the mayor there.

"My dear," the woman had said, dressed then in an exquisitely bright sundress, the fabric as pale as the cracked-open yolk of a summer sky. "Your stylist said you like to read?"

 

*

 

Liesel Meminger stole her first book when she was ten years old. Magdova Merandes of District 4 had just won the 8th Annual Hunger Games. Her brother had just died.

It was a gravedigger's handbook. And as long as Liesel lived, some part of her would always be grateful that she learned to read on that book. Every chapter was perfectly preserved in her memory. She certainly got a lot more use out of it than anything they tried to teach her in school.

She was, frankly, an expert in burying people.

 

*

 

The mine collapse that killed Hans Hubermann was ruled by the foreman to be an accident.

"It happens," was all he could say to her. "When we have to mine as deep in the earth as we do, when none of our equipment is up to standard, when we're forced to --" he cut himself off there, fortunately, before Liesel found herself in the bizarre situation of having to stop him. "And your papa was -- well, he was old. I'm sorry, child. I'm sorry."

Mama, when they told her, didn't believe them.

"Don't be stupid," she said, waving them off. "Quit wasting my time unless you have something useful to say."

You could see it on her face, though. A whiteness appearing in her eyes, rounding with fear. It was an expression familiar to anyone in District 12. Everybody -- or at least everybody who was Seam -- lived in dread of this exact moment. For three nights, after, she didn't move from their bed. She kept Papa's accordion strapped to her chest like she thought if she breathed for it, it would pump his lungs, too, and it would bring him back. Finally, when Liesel was forced to go in and rouse her for the funeral, she got up. She pulled her iron-grey hair back with elastic. She broke the ground over his grave. She put her hand on Liesel's back and then lifted it again, saying with only a scrim of her usual venom, "Jehosophat, you filthy creature, what is all this? When was the last time you bathed?"

Liesel didn't tell her that they had to knock her unconscious to clean her after they lifted her from the arena. She wouldn't let them go near her otherwise, because the grime and ashes on her body were all she had left. It was the only thing of Rudy's they let her keep, and then she didn't even have that.

When the Hubermanns moved from their home in the Seam into Liesel's new house in the Victor's Village, she informed them with great delight that they didn't have to work if they didn't want to. With her winnings, they had more money than they could ever spend.

Papa chuckled, scraping her hair back from her forehead to kiss it.

"And what would I do with myself then, child?" he asked. "Play the accordion all day?"

"Fat chance," snorted Rosa, moving in to fix Liesel's hair. She'd bruised her several more times upon her return, as if she thought if she didn't squeeze at her with all her force, she'd disappear again. Liesel was trying to adjust to all the affection. "I'd kill you myself if I had to deal with you on that abominable thing every hour of the day."

Hans rolled his eyes at her, as he always did, before turning his attention back to his fifteen-year-old daughter. 

"I'm not going to leave my team a man short, Liesel. Perhaps in a few years I'll retire. But I'm afraid, after everything, mining's gotten its hold on me."

So off he went, six days out of seven, and Liesel indulged him, because she enjoyed programming the shower for him when he came home. He said she was the only one who knew the right combination of buttons that could get the coal dust off. She enjoyed the way Mama's sourness lifted at the sound of his boot on the step. 

The joy in Papa leaving was really more the joy of him coming home. She saw no harm in it.

Rosa Hubermann had been a miner herself in those early days after the Uprising. She had to. The Capitol had taken her children as punishment for Hans' involvement in the rebel army: her son they relocated to District 2 to train as a Peacekeeper. Trudy Hubermann was sent to 9, to work in the factories that made the bullets that her brother would shoot into the heads of District lawbreakers. It was a common practice in those days, rearranging the population so that those best suited for a District specialty would be moved to that District. 

At least, that's what they claimed. Really, Liesel supposed it was just a way to break up rebel groups, rebel families, rebel comrades, to divide them and conquer them. They did it to Max's family too, and although she didn't know it yet, in a few months Alex Steiner would be given his relocation orders to 8. His family would not be allowed to accompany him.

Divide and conquer.

The night before Hans Hubermann's funeral, a young miner named Reinhold Zucker came to the door in the dead of night.

He was reeling drunk, reeking of white liquor from the Hob, and he scratched at the door until Liesel dragged herself off the rug in front of the fire and opened it. He took one look at her and started shaking.

"It was me," he told her, and it struck her as hard as the boom of the cannon in the arena. She shattered at the impact. "It was my fault. I told him to switch places with me that day. If I hadn't, it would have been me caught in that -- if I hadn't -- it's my fault your father is dead."

And Liesel?

Liesel Meminger, who in just a single year had lost both her best friend and her father?

She launched herself off the front step and landed on Reinhold Zucker, toppling them, grabbing him by the face and digging her thumbs at his eyes. An unholy screech tore out of her like it had nails, ripping at her lungs on the way out. They howled like alley cats, Liesel scratching and clawing and beating at his head with her balled-up fists and Reinhold holding up his arms to fend her off, until the worst possible thing fell out of his mouth.

"They paid me!" he cried. "I had to! They paid me to do it!"

And after that, only the intervention of a Peacekeeper stopped her from killing for the first time in her life. His name was Walter; he was large and kind and serious and he wrapped his arms around her from behind, lifting her clean off of Reinhold and holding her up off the ground as she thrashed and kicked.

He took her to the Meadow, where he left her curled up and retching amongst the dry autumn grass. When he returned, he had Max with him.

They felt along the ground in the pitch dark until they found her, covered in the dirt and broken-down twigs she'd tried to pull over herself like a blanket. Max held her hand, finding her split knuckles and covering them with his thumb. They sat there until dawn.

As the shadows eased off their faces, Liesel ventured, feeling out the hard, pebbly sensation of truth on her lips, "They killed my papa because of what I said."

And Max Vandenburg, who'd never lied to a child, said, "Yes."

 

*

 

At the height of Liesel's popularity, she could be doing as many as twelve concerts a year, on top of her job, her duties as a mentor, and being a host for whatever shell-shocked creature came to 12 on their Victory Tour. There was a limit on how many times she could be brought to the Capitol, of course, so if there was an inexplicable off-season demand for her voice, sometimes they set her up in a recording studio and then displayed her image holographically in front of the crowd come concert-time.

One year, Liesel arrived in the Capitol incredibly sick.

Her breath rattled wheezily in her lungs, and any movement to get up off the cold tile floor of the bathroom triggered a nausea that whited out her vision. She remained where she was, trembling.

It was the half-way point between the 39th Hunger Games and the 40th. She'd been told she would perform at the president's mansion this evening, in honor of the Victor from the 39th -- a tall, hungry-eyed girl named Seeder from District 11, who Liesel genuinely liked, although Seeder hadn't done anything to stop Liesel's own tributes from starving to death, and she could have. 

The longer she lived, however, the harder it got to resent the children who won.

The door whisked open, and she dragged her head up, expecting to see her gravediggers, fluttering and exclaiming about the state of her make-up or the costume that had crumpled under her.

Instead, an Avox paused in the doorway. She took in the situation in one flick of her eyes.

As she approached, and Liesel got a clearer look at her face -- elderly, mid-seventies at least, with deep creases forming crow's feet around her soft, melted-colored eyes -- her heart bumped, startled, and then leapt in her chest. Recognition shocked at her.

Linne Vandenburg knelt soundlessly on the tile beside her.

She reached out, touching the tips of her fingers to Liesel's chest and feeling each hard contraction her lungs made to suck down enough air. Her brow furrowed with concentration, and Liesel took the opportunity to devour the sight of her.

How strange it is, she thought, to be so haunted by a person and then to see them in front of you, to see them _move._

She'd only ever seen Max's mother in paint. Mostly, they'd been abstract portraits: a suggestion of a woman in a miner's helmet, a shadowy figure in a doorway carrying the humpy shape of an accordion, a silhouette caught in barbed wire with the rebel symbol emblazoned in red over her heart. Once, though, once he'd drawn his whole family in exquisite detail, buying expensive pencils with colored centers, shading them in strokes of charcoal. When she'd gone to him for stories from his original District, he'd come up with some children's fable about a boastful billy goat that kept leaping up higher and higher up a cliff face, and Liesel delivered it on a sheet of paper to Ilsa Hermann with the family portrait on the back.

Linne being here -- was this Ilsa's doing?

The Avox lifted her eyes questioningly, tapping her chest.

"It's the coal dust," Liesel explained, her voice in pieces. "From my District. It gets into everything eventually, especially your lungs. They've got a," she struggled to sit up, but her stomach rolled and her mouth slicked with saliva, and she sunk back to avoid vomiting. "A -- a patch here -- they give it to me when I need to sing. It goes over --" but Max's mother was already up, moving briskly out of the room to find the first-aid.

She came back with the patch, and with difficulty, they got the top of Liesel's costume peeled down enough to apply it. They waited as the medicine seeped in, cool and numbing and loosening the tightness in Liesel's chest.

Then, hesitantly, Linne's hand moved next to her belly, flattening out. The skin there was hard, like the inside of a nut. 

She lifted her eyes, widening them.

Liesel smiled and nodded in confirmation. "They call it morning sickness, but really it's 'whatever time of day is most inconvenient for you' sickness. It was the same with my sons."

Carefully, slowly, and with great consideration for the pitching in Liesel's stomach, they got her upright again. It would take some doing to get her make-up and costume back in order, and really, she should call her gravediggers for this, but she let Linne move about her, redoing the stays (it crushed her pregnant belly into her, but she was sure the Capitol cared less about that than they did about making sure she appeared skinny to the viewers) and pulling at her beige-colored hair until it teased out around her head again. 

The cool press of Linne's dry hand against the back of her neck was lovely. It reminded her of her mother, of Rosa Hubermann, of Mags. It reminded her how Max Vandenburg's hand was the first thing she grabbed coming out of the arena, how he lifted her into the hovercraft with a look of spectacular helplessness on his face, and let her bury her gas mask against his chest.

It gave her the courage to say, "Sometimes I wish they'd let me go back to District 2."

Max's mother stilled, but only for a moment.

Casually, Liesel continued, "I've only seen it once, of course, on my own Victory Tour … what, twenty-five years ago? It's a lot like my own District, of course, with the mountains, but different, too, in so many beautiful ways. The way the sun rose and threw light down into the valleys between tunnels …"

The hands on her back had stopped completely, fisted up against her spine.

Liesel wasn't imagining how they trembled.

Max's Capitol father had been stationed in District 2. He married a District girl and they had a son who grew up there. All of his friends, his neighbors -- everybody Max ever knew he left behind when they fled for District 12 in the Uprising. Except for one. One person waited, got his Peacekeeping uniform, and then shipped out to District 12 to find him.

Liesel knew more about Max's family than she ever had about her own blood relatives.

"My mentor even painted it a few times," she said quietly, as if to herself. "Once, he did the whole thing. It took up -- it took the _entire_ wall. As much of the District he could fit in, he did. The mountains, the morning fog creeping over the green, the villages dotting the mountainside and the trains, always the trains, coming in and out." She chuckled. "Walter hated it," and the hands spasmed against her, flaying open. "He complained that they'd left it behind, and here Max was, trying to bring it all back again."

She paused, and after a shaky moment, Linne resumed her work. In the quiet, Liesel lifted her voice again, this time in song -- for practice, of course, to warm up her newly-medicated lungs -- and if what she sung was an old mountain air from District 2, well, she _had_ just been talking about it. Linne's throat made a mutilated noise.

If they punished you, you sang. If they punched you, you kept singing. If they beat you, again and again, you _kept singing._

Linne Vandenburg came around front, hands trailing down Liesel's arms to wrap clumsily around her own, and her eyes _burned._ They were glassy with tears, glittering and blazingly sunstruck.

Liesel gazed back at her, and then she swayed, as if dizzy.

Linne caught her, and Liesel used that to wrap her arms around her shoulders, hauling herself up to whisper flush against Max's mother's ear, "He's alive. I promise. Whatever they tell you, whatever they show you, whatever they say on the television, I _promise you,_ Frau Vandenburg -- he's alive."

 

*

 

When Liesel Meminger became Panem's youngest-ever Victor, three weeks past her fifteenth birthday, she returned to District 12 with the assurance that she didn't have to go back to school, and she would never have to work in the mines. Those were her rewards.

"What do they expect me to do, then?" she asked Max, drawing her legs up to her on the kitchen counter. "With the rest of my life?"

Mama answered for her. 

"Get down!" she snapped, smacking Liesel with her spoon hard enough to raise a mark. "I didn't take you in and raise you to act like an animal, go sit at the table and pretend you've got manners, I swear to -- Max. Your soup. Do you want a cup or a bowl?"

"Erm," answered the nonplussed Max Vandenburg. Liesel, sliding into the chair across from him, smirked, enjoying how Rosa Hubermann could disconcert everyone she ever talked to, including the experienced killer sitting at their table. "I'm okay, Frau Hubermann --"

"Cup, then," she answered briskly. "And you will tell me if you want more. Don't argue. And _you --"_ she rounded on Liesel now, the cardboard of her mouth compacting. "You will assimilate. They will expect nothing less from you. The Capitol will make you their darling, and going to school, learning a specialty, going to work -- these are District things. Petty District trifles. They want you to be _theirs,_ not District. And so, you will not work."

After Liesel's mistake at the 14th Hunger Games and the subsequent death of both her parents, Michael Holtzapfel came to her door.

He waited until she could bring herself to answer it, and tentatively asked if she would like to come teach at the school.

Liesel scraped her uncombed hair away from her face and studied him.

He fidgeted under her scrutiny, tugging unnecessarily at the bandages covering his mutilated hand -- courtesy of a mine accident. His younger brother had been Reaped the year before her. They'd all watched his legs get torn off at the knee by some gape-mawed lizard mutt in the pit he fell into in his arena, watched him moan and cry for his mother and bleed to death with gruesome slowness. You could see it even now, in the lines in Michael's face.

On clear nights, she still heard the howling that rose from the Holtzapfels' house in the Seam.

They'd gone over there, her and Papa and Mama, for every evening broadcast, so the Holtzapfels would have somebody there for support, to do the cooking or the washing, if needed. Michael and his mother returned the favor for the Hubermanns, she heard, when it was her own turn in the Games.

"Yes," she agreed, without even asking what they wanted her to teach.

 

*

 

When she came of age, Liesel would be expected to act upon her talent for the Capitol's benefit, but it was in the safety of District 12 that she got good at it. 

She taught an after-school music class. It was, without a doubt, the most popular extracurricular activity in the District -- largely because Liesel brought food: doughy rolls baked with nuts and raisins; crackers sprinkled with sesame seeds; clusters of nuts held together with a sugary, nutrient-rich substance they made in District 5; and when times were hard, vegetables sliced into even pieces worked. She had to divide the week up by age groups; her classes were too large, otherwise.

It also meant that for the next forty-five years, Liesel Meminger almost always knew her tributes before they were Reaped.

In some ways, it helped. She knew their names, their families, their backgrounds. She knew how they'd work their interviews, how they'd present themselves to the Gamemakers in training. She knew what to say to sponsors. Her tributes almost always knew more about the other Districts than other Districts knew about them, because Liesel taught them District songs. You can learn a lot about people by the music they sing. Every year, she'd come back with two fresh corpses and something new to teach in the music room: sea shanties from District 4, folk ballads from 7, steady rhythmic chants from 1 and 11 that were catchy and easy to perform repetitive tasks to.

She even got Max to come in occasionally and accompany them on her papa's accordion, although in their hands the instrument never transformed the way it did in Hans Hubermann's. They could play it, but Hans had made it _breathe._

"Better you than me," he said to her, when he first heard about her classes. Bettina Steiner had run on ahead through the gates of the Victor's Village so she could be the first to tell him. "Hanging around the school all the time, I mean. I'd rather be known as a hermit than … well, that."

"Don't be stupid," Liesel brushed that off, but he just cut her a knowing smile.

 

*

 

Most of the surviving Steiner children never married. 

There were five of them; Kurt the oldest, Bettina the youngest. They rallied around their mother after Alex Steiner's deportation. They worked in the tailor's shop on Merchant Street and ran a booth at the market (the legal one.) They stuck together. They did not marry, bar one.

It wasn't uncommon. If your children were going to die in the Hunger Games, then the solution was to stop having children.

Sometime after the First Quarter Quell, when starvation, hard labor conditions, and casual executions coupled with the declining birth rate showed a negative population growth in several of the Districts, the Capitol intervened. It outlawed any access to birth control. In District 5 even, where they produced pharmaceuticals, a whole group of women "volunteers" were "accidentally" inseminated while undergoing experimentation. The message was clear: the Capitol would only allow you that choice so long as you chose what the Capitol wanted.

Bettina Steiner had been five years old when her brother Rudy died in Liesel's arms. She married the apothecary's son on an early summer day.

The afternoon sky was watery, fruit-colored with a wavering, sinking sun. Bettina and her husband signed a license at the Justice Building, and then she came to Liesel Meminger.

"Will you sing at the threshold ceremony?" was the request she brought with her, carried in both hands like a precious thing. She wore the same white dress the merchant girls usually rented, and her golden hair was brushed back into a criss-crossed crown atop her head. She was much older than most District 12 brides usually were, and she was lovely.

"Bettina --" Liesel started.

Reading the refusal on her face, Bettina stepped forward, crowding Liesel against the doorframe of her own home. "Please," she begged. "Please, Liesel. I -- I'm sorry about your son," blurted out of her. It splattered at their feet, and Bettina flinched away from the mess. "I -- I --"

"Bettina …"

"It was cruel. It was _wrong,"_ her eyes darted nervously, swaying, but she gulped back. "All of us, merchant and Seam, everything we had to spare, we gave to sponsor him, you _know_ that. We know you know that, it was -- you're _our_ Victor, _ours,_ and I don't want to … I don't want to cross the threshold into married life without your voice, please, Liesel, it's the most powerful thing I know."

 

*

 

"And with the Second Quarter Quell just around the corner -- ! Well, it certainly throws us right back to why we're doing this. As one of our first Victors, Liesel, what are your thoughts?"

_Careful, Liesel. Careful. Don't make the same mistakes you did when you were fifteen._

"I think it's boring to repeat a Quell," she said, injecting a cheery lilt to her voice. They could be talking about the weather, the shrimp, the new president. Across from her, the interviewer blinked. His eyelashes had been surgically altered to twice their length, with miniature snowflakes clustered at their ends. He wasn't much -- some youngblood Games presenter want-to-be. She could barely remember his name. Flickerman something? "Trust me, the Districts are Quelled."

Smile, smile. It was a joke.

"All those troubles," airy wave of her hand, like she wasn't talking about war, slaughter, and the annihilation of District 13. "It was so long ago. Surely there's a way to work with the Districts that doesn't involve --" _killing our children. How dare you touch our children, how_ dare _you, they're not guilty of anything!_

_No, you can't say that, they'll kill your husband. They'll kill your boy._

_You're the word-shaker, Liesel. Find the words!_

"-- such humiliation."

Caesar leapt on that eagerly. "Is that what you think? The Quell is humiliating?"

"The Games are humiliating!" Liesel laughed. "Every year! Herr Flickerman, I'm from District 12, and we've only had two Victors in the past fifty years. Of course the Games are an embarrassment."

On who?

On who, indeed.

 

*

 

The arena for the 13th Annual Hunger Games had been built on the western-facing slopes of the Capitol mountains.

At least, Liesel assumed that's where they were. This was before they'd mastered the ability to terraform arenas from scratch, and had to work with existing landscape. Regardless, the foliage, the earth, the foothills all looked familiar -- she'd just seen it all, coming from the other direction.

Nothing existed west of the Capitol, everyone said, except ocean and maybe some far-off landmasses that once held population, but didn't anymore.

The Capitol, District 7 to the north, and District 1 to the south … theirs were the western-most borders of Panem. 

_I am standing further west than any citizen of Panem will probably ever stand in their entire life,_ Liesel thought, as she and Rudy hiked higher into the foothills to find a place far, far away from the Cornucopia to hide for the night. It made her toes curl inside her boots with delight, that thought, even as the sun baked the back of her neck and her tongue parched itself to the roof of her mouth. No rain this side of the mountains, either.

Liesel Meminger was both the youngest and the smallest tribute in the arena this year.

(No twelve- or thirteen-year-olds had been Reaped. Supposedly, this was simply a lucky year for the Districts, but Liesel would later find out that it had more to do with some high-ranking government official, whose thirteen-year-old daughter had just died -- faulty medicine from 5. They'd loved the Games, the politician and his daughter, so the Capitol removed the names of the youngest entrants from the Reaping that year, to spare him any further trauma. To speak nothing of the _Districts'_ trauma, of course, but who cared about that?)

Rudy wasn't much older, but he'd always been the champion in school athletic competitions. He could outrun anyone in District 12. He'd even gotten a head-start on his growth spurt, which Liesel -- who'd always relied on being eye-to-eye with him during their games in the Meadow -- found obnoxious.

And then there was the issue of him being Panem's very first volunteer.

("Well, I do like being first," he'd said to her, and then, "ow!" when she got a hard hit on his ribs.)

There was no arguing that he set a precedent, one Liesel would see develop in the evolving Career Districts for the next forty years. And while part of her will never forgive that stupid, miserable, filthy merchant pig for it, she knew why he did it.

In those few, hot, awful moments after Liesel Meminger was called to the stage at the Reaping, Rudy Steiner took one look at his family, judged himself to be the starving mouth most expendable, and decided he was going to go with his best friend. That's what they'd done all their lives. Rudy went where Liesel went, Liesel went where Rudy went. No reason to stop now. The Capitol didn't have the power to come in between that, he wasn't going to let it. 

The fact that by volunteering, he also spared the handicapped Tommy Muller just made it easier.

And, perhaps worst of all, it didn't occur to him that Liesel might survive without him. He genuinely thought they were both going to their deaths.

 

*

 

"So …" Rudy kicked at the yellow tracking along the edge of the stair. "What do you want to do?"

Liesel glanced about. A couple of the tributes had beelined right for the weapon racks; the big guy from District 10 had a mace in hand and was already beckoning over one of the attendants to partner with him. There was something sadistic about the way he handled that weapon that made her want to be on the opposite end of the Training Center, right _now._

Rudy brightened, nudging her. "Hey! I've always wondered what it would be like to hold a sword. Do you want to give it a try?"

"No," Liesel said immediately. What she really wanted was the Meadow, a ball, and her Papa playing the accordion on the grass. Was there anywhere they could go and just … oh, _play_ sounded like such a childish word, but that was exactly what she wanted to do. "Come on. We don't know how to start a fire without matches. Let's try that."

From their arrival in the Capitol onward, they, by wordless agreement, spent every waking moment together, as much as they possibly could. They did all their training at the survivalist stations, avoiding the weapons entirely. They ate cake together on Liesel's birthday (they'd never had cake before, it was exciting!), they studied edible plants and camp-making together, they prepped with Dolphine and Max together, because if they only had days left to live, they sure weren't going to spend that time alone.

Liesel scraped by with a training score of three, Rudy a six, and this was before they interviewed tributes in front of a live audience, so when the Capitol cameras caught up to them in the press room, they were always together, dressed by their stylist to match, and that's how they presented themselves: Liesel-and-Rudy, the District 12 tributes. Rudy blew kisses to his baby sisters back home.

Very few of the other tributes made any impression on her whatsoever. 

Some part of her already considered them all to be dead, so it didn't matter if she knew who they were or not.

Certainly she remembered some of them, like Viktor Chemmel, the District 10 boy who'd gone after an attendant with a mace that day, or Franz Deutcher of 7, who slammed Rudy's face into the lunch table and sneered, "oops, sorry, thought you were a rat," or the District 5 girl, who'd asked Max about uppercuts in the elevator and called him "Vandenburg-san," which thrilled her down to her core, because if they had one form of address in District 12 and a different form of address in District 5, did that mean there were more?

But none of them were Rudy.

Rudy Steiner was the only thing about the 13th Hunger Games she cared about.

 

*

 

They had one ally in the arena.

He found them on the second morning, because they weren't exactly making it difficult, standing out in the open arguing about whether they should head back downhill or continue on up into the foothills. Liesel voted for the latter, deeming it safer, but Rudy wanted to know what they'd do if they reached the edge of the arena and found themselves in a corner with another tribute bearing down on them.

"So you want to go to _them_ instead?" Liesel demanded impatiently. "You _dummkompf,_ we'll be killed for sure!"

"So, what, you're just going to sit here?"

"No, I want you to rethink and come to the right opinion."

"Or!" a voice called from the trees behind them, sending their hearts jolting right out of their bodies with fright, diving for the safety of the rocks and leaving the rest of them obliged to follow. "I could just kill you both now. It'd solve your problem!"

It took him five laughing minutes to coax them back out again, promising he wasn't _really_ here to kill them, and he even went so far as to remove all visible weapons from his person and set them down to prove it. When they emerged, they found themselves on a hillside with the boy from District 1. 

His name was Glorious ("but people call me Arthur for short. Arthur Berg,") and he was sixteen years old and covered in an unfortunate amount of pimples.

"Why aren't you going to kill us?" Rudy asked belligerently, and Arthur looked offended.

"You're District 12, aren't you? District 12's a mining District, and us miners have to stick together," he told them, like it really was that simple. District 1 made luxury items for the Capitol, which included mining for precious gems. Arthur's family, she later found out, lived in an area he called the Red Canyon, in the southern-most part of District 1, where they farmed turquoise. She even got to see it on her Tour. "Why, do you want to die?"

"No!" they answered together, and he grinned.

"Good, because I have a plan, and it involves someone very little and very quick."

"… I'm very little," Liesel volunteered.

Rudy finished, "And I'm very quick!"

The plan involved quite a lot of thievery: food, mostly, because none of them were very good at scavenging it on their own. Supplies, when they needed it, or when it was to their advantage to remove a key item from another tribute. Arthur didn't see any reason they should have to kill anyone, although they might get killed if they didn't get out of there quick enough.

"Have either of you ever stolen anything before?"

"Sure! All the time," Rudy lied.

"I've stolen books," Liesel offered, shyly. "Three of them."

"You can't eat books, sweetheart," Arthur chuckled. And then, "Come on, let's go get breakfast."

"At this rate," Rudy murmured to Liesel as they trekked back downhill. "They're going to need to bring the referees back just to get us back on track," and Liesel smirked. The very early Games were always presided over by a referee. Their job was to remind the tributes that they were there to kill each other, just in case they got any other ideas.

_We were all just really baffled by the whole thing,_ Max recalled. _We didn't want to fight. What had these other people ever done to us?_

_Right,_ agreed the District 8 Victor, seated on Liesel's other side. _We'd been allies in the Uprising. Why would we suddenly want to kill each other? The referees were there to persuade us._

They were all cooped up in the control room, and a howling snowstorm meant that almost all their tributes had run to ground, so there wasn't much to do. At her station, Victorie Heavensbee nodded slowly, mulling it over. She shifted her toddling son, Plutarch, to the other hip and said, very dryly, _I remember most of us would have rather killed that damn referee than each other,_ and Mags cackled.

Of course, by the time Liesel and Rudy were Reaped, a whole generation of children had grown into a world where the Hunger Games dictated their relationships with the other Districts, and they knew what was expected of them. The referees weren't needed.

 

*

 

"Psst!" Rudy hissed over at her, and Liesel bared her teeth in return, letting him know _exactly_ how she was going to grind his face into the mud if he got them caught. "Psst, you filthy ass-scratcher, I'll make a deal with you!"

They were waiting for the girl from District 6, Otto Sturm. According to Arthur, she had the largest stockpile of food out of anyone in the arena. Also, apparently she'd gotten out of the Cornucopia with a most excellent traveling basket, and they wanted it.

Right now, though, it was hot and scratchy under the summer sun and they were tired of waiting. Liesel's lookout was a bush that draped haphazardly over an overhanging ledge, and she'd watched at least four separate curious insects crawl up under her sleeve without being able to do anything about it.

"What!" she hissed back.

"If I get the goods and get back to the rendezvous point before you do, then I get to claim a prize!"

"You're not getting any prize," Liesel retorted, kneejerk. And then, "What do you want?"

Rudy's teeth winked white at her across the distance. "How about a kiss?"

She rolled her eyes so hard she was afraid they'd come right out of her head and drop off the ledge.

"Gross," she complained, and Rudy's huffing laughter carried them through the rest of their wait.

 

*

 

When she pulled him out of the river, streams of water poured off of him, and he blinked up at her through crooked, clumpy eyelashes.

Registering the terror that had to be all over her face, he grinned at her with great delight, all his teeth on display.

"How about that kiss?" he wanted to know, and Liesel didn't know what it was about that moment, but it got stuck. It squeezed itself into some crack in her heart and became sediment there, crystallizing like a coal seam, like hundreds of years from now somebody would come along and mine it out of her and there he would be, Rudy Steiner, perfectly preserved and permanently fifteen years old. 

Liesel Meminger would never forget this moment. She would relive it a thousand times: her hand and Rudy's, gripping each other's forearms, Rudy's slick wet hair and slick wet mouth, the way he smiled at her like it didn't matter where they were, they could be anywhere and he'd still smile at her like it was a Sunday in the Meadow.

It would haunt her all her life.

At the time, she'd ignored the nervous bubbling in her stomach and just rolled her eyes and said, "Oh, come _on,"_ and they scrambled up the hill to where Arthur was gesturing at them frantically, yelling about Deutcher and Deutcher's _stupid_ deadly rapier and they needed to get out of here now, now, _now._

 

*

 

When they were children, before they could even sign up for tessarae, they used to walk by the gates of the Victor's Village the way she'd once done with her brother.

They'd suck on pine bark to ease the aching in their bellies, passing pieces of soft, white wood back and forth until they'd gnawed it all up, peering in between the bars at the immaculate houses. Everything was quiet, still. The birds didn't even disturb the eaves, and no squirrels rioted across the gutters. They knew somebody lived there, but they'd never seen him except on stage at Reapings and on television.

"Do you suppose that's his talent?" Rudy asked, keeping his voice down like the noise would disturb the stillness of the place.

Liesel squinted at him. "What?"

"Max Vandenburg," Rudy clarified, impatiently. "Do you think that's his talent?"

"What, being impossible to find?"

"Yeah, exactly! Don't you think it's weird that we've lived here longer than he has, and yet, we never see him anywhere! Not at the market, not at the harvest festival -- it's like he doesn't exist when the Hunger Games aren't happening. Where does he _go?"_

Liesel found out when she was sixteen, orphaned again and so, so, _so_ angry that it never went away. She could taste it in everything she ate, felt it in every part of her like she was covered in hairline fractures, like her insides were coated and one struck match would turn her into cinders. It burned at her, that kind of helpless fury, and Max found her one morning on her front step, cradling Hans Hubermann's accordion to her chest. It wheezed faintly at her occasional movement, a half-sigh of a note.

He stood in front of her, bramble-haired, and every part of him looked hollow, like she could throw a coin in him and never hear it hit bottom.

She wanted to smash him into pieces, except he extended a hand to her and said, "Come on, I want to show you something."

He pulled her off the steps of Number 33, and she followed him past Number 35, which was his official address. She'd been inside: it was more hollow than he was, with hardly anything in it at all.

He led her all the way down to the house at the end of the lane. They went around the side to the kitchen door, and Max lifted the broken lock, shimmying the door open. They stepped inside, but he didn't wait for her to look about. He led her to the basement steps. A glow of light pooled at the bottom: he must have a kerosene lamp down there.

"Is this where you go?" Liesel asked with dawning realization. "When none of us can find you?"

Max's smile softened. "My mother and I spent a lot of time in basements when we were trying to get out of District 2. I know it's the fist-fighting I'm famous for," he spread his hands out, studying his knuckles the way Liesel would look at a book she'd never read. "But honestly, I think I'm much better at hiding than I am at anything else."

He stepped back, and she descended the basement steps on her own.

"Oh," she gasped, lifting her hand from the banister and then forgetting about it, so that it hovered in the air in front of her. Her eyes darted back and forth, landing on each feature of the room and flicking away again: a mattress on the floor, protected by a pile of tarps, a heap of paint cans clustered together in the corner, a washing line strung from the banister and fastened to a nailhead on the opposite side of the room. Pages clung to it with clothespins.

And the walls --

The walls were covered in paint. So were the pages on the washing line, but the _walls._

Some of what Max had painted was minuscule; next to the mattress, at about eye-level, three bricks stood in a row with entire scenes contained within each one. Some of what Max had painted was wild and enormous, taking up a seven-foot section of wall. She could tell by the fringes that feathered the floor and ceiling that Max routinely covered the whole basement in a coat of white, to give himself fresh canvas.

She looked back up the steps.

Max sat at the top. "I lose days down here," he explained. "I can go -- it feels like months, I'll go without seeing the sun, or the clouds, or the stars, and then when I have to go outside again, everything burns." He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, like the memory of it hurt.

" _Ja,"_ Liesel said.

" _Ja,"_ Max agreed, very quiet.

Something snagged her attention then, and she turned away from him, ducking underneath the washing line and the nearest page that hung from it (the woman painted on it bore frightening resemblance to Frau Holtzapfel, and looking at it made her feel like she was going to get spat on; Frau Holtzapfel had excellent aim,) to get a better look. Against the wall, framed by a suggestion of a golden chariot, were --

"This is us," said Liesel in surprise. "Rudy and I, at the presentation of the tributes."

She didn't know how she knew. The smears of paint were abstract at best, quick lines that could have been people as easily as they could be anything else, but she could make out herself in grey, and Rudy beside her, black-painted except for the "12" on his chest.

"Was it really coal dust they covered him in?" Max wanted to know.

"I think so. For authenticity, maybe? They covered every inch of him," Liesel confirmed. They'd turned Rudy Steiner black as coal, and dressed her up like a miner to match, with an oversized foam axe hiked over her shoulder. She felt ridiculous. She probably looked even worse. "I was still digging it out of my ears when I went into the arena."

Now that she was looking, she could spot the ravages of other years, other Games, other tributes, memorialized in paint.

"Your stylist was an idiot."

"He was all right," Liesel defended, absently.

 

*

 

Liesel and Rudy's stylist called himself Orpheus, a name Liesel forgot thirty seconds after being told. If she didn't care about the other tributes, then she certainly didn't care about some frivolous Capitol fashion designer looking to use them as a stepping stone. 

The man himself came in while she was still lying on the table in the prep room, feeling raw from where her gravediggers had stripped her of years of coal dirt, and at least three layers of skin.

Perhaps she should have seen Rudy's coal-covered entrance coming, because when the stylist stepped around to where she could see him, the first thing she registered was that he was in head-to-toe black. His boot heels thudded against each other. His gloves squeaked when he folded his arms.

Most noticeably, he wore a mask that covered almost the entirety of his face, except for a single blue eye. 

Something told her it wasn't purely a stylistic choice.

"Hello, Liesel," he said in a slow voice like still water, like it would take a lot to disturb.

"What happened to you?" Liesel asked, with the rudeness of a child.

It was impossible to tell, but the mask moved with the suggestion of a smile.

"The Uprising, of course, what do you think happened?" he replied. "I was enlisted to the science division, doing … design work of a different sort, for the war effort. Then the rebels finally figured out where we grew the mutts, and gassed us." He pointed to his face, then gestured to the rest of him. Every inch of skin was covered by black fabric. "Cell damage. They couldn't even graft it back. My own mother wouldn't recognize me," and a chuckle scraped out of him. "Doesn't, in fact. I've run into her a few times. She's still waiting for them to bring her a body."

She listened, still on her back. "Do you hate us?" seemed a relevant question to ask.

He hesitated, and she could tell he was determining whether to be honest or not.

"Maybe," he admitted. "But not in the way you'd think. We learn it as children, and it takes daily effort to unlearn it when you're grown. Now, is this what you wore at the Reaping?" He crossed to the chair where Liesel'd folded up her dress and smock before the prep team came in.

She bolted upright. "No --!"

It was too late. As he pulled the dress off the chair and shook it out, a bent-cornered book came loose from the folds of her clothes and hit the ground at his feet, where it split open, broken-backed.

For a beat, they both just looked at it.

Watching a few pages lift and then collapse, Liesel tried to shrink, drawing her knees up to her chest and ducking her head. Finally, he lowered the dress and then bent down, picking it up.

"Is this yours?" he asked, turning it over.

He tilted it towards her questioningly, like somehow somebody else's book might have ended up in her clothes, and it prompted a defiant "yes!" out of her.

He looked at it again. "Do they often hand out … Capitol novels in District 12?"

Liesel hid her cringe. She hadn't gotten a chance to look at it closely yet. She'd seen it poking out of a gravedigger's jacket pocket as they worked over a tray of gels and lotions, chattering at each other and complaining about her body hair (she was prepubescent. How much body hair could she have? Too much for Capitol sensibilities, apparently,) and grabbed it at the first opportunity. It was her third stolen book.

"More often than you'd think," she lied, and his single visible eyebrow lifted.

Then, to her great surprise, he closed it and put it back on the chair. When he finished inspecting her Reaping outfit, he folded that up and placed it on top.

Liesel watched him, and something like understanding kindled in the space just underneath her ribs.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Orpheus."

"No," she shook her head, not knowing how she knew, but feeling certain of it. "Your real name."

He paused, then came about to face her, heels together and arms folded across his chest, one hand lifted to his chin in a thoughtful pose. It was a long time before he spoke, but when he did, it came out of him lake-deep, slow, "When the rebels took out the laboratory I was working in, I met Death -- strange individual, very fond of colors, it was weird -- and afterwards, when I climbed out, I didn't look back."

He was silent for another long moment.

"But," he said quietly. "Since I'm asking you to trust me with your image, it wouldn't make sense for me not to trust you." His gaze snapped back to her, and again, there was the impression of a smile. "It's Johann."

 

*

 

When the noise finally stopped, Liesel lay buried under the destruction, caked in debris and parched the color of tombstones. Rubble made her bed, and in her ear, the cuckoo alarm programmed into her gas mask kept sounding, warning her of undetonated bombs nearby. 

She kept frozen and still, not daring to move in case it triggered more blasts.

How long she lay there, she wouldn't know until she saw the other side of it in the recap.

First came the immediate, frantic arrival of the hovercraft, then the dispersion of Capitol utility workers who started crawling over the mountain range of rubble, carrying scanners and lead by bounding finder-mutts with keen noses and intelligent eyes, and the steady unearthing of each new body. First they found Esper from 4, then the pair from 3 who'd brought up the idea of dropping bombs on the arena in the first place. Next came both tributes from 11, and Franz Deutcher of 7. The only part of Viktor Chemmel that could be identified were his teeth.

By the time they found Liesel Meminger, she was the only one left alive. 

They had their Victor.

All bets had been on Viktor Chemmel, she was pretty sure, since the only people who really bet on her were Max and Ilsa Hermann.

Victor Viktor had a nice ring to it, and three of the twelve living Victors at that point were from District 10, the slaughterhouse District, so they had the lead. It left some of the other Districts with no Victor at all; in fact, as punishment for the politician's daughter, District 5 wouldn't be allowed to have their first Victor until the year before the first Quarter Quell.

It was while she was down there, buried cellar-deep and breathing slowly to preserve the oxygen reserves in her mask, that Liesel thought for one strange, lit moment that she could see somebody standing over her.

She blinked once, then twice, and squinted, but no matter what, the figure didn't coalesce into anybody recognizable; she could determine no physical features, couldn't even peg a masculine or feminine nature -- seemingly, the figure was both at once. The one thing she could see clearly was that her visitor carried something in arms, gently, protectively, the way you'd hold something impossible and fragile. 

The way you'd hold children.

Instinctively, she reached up.

"Oh, no," said a voice above her head. "Not you. Not yet. You've many years ahead of you, book thief, and they will be very busy for the both of us."

A pause.

Then, "When the time comes, call me to the tree."

"Like the song?" Liesel coughed out, confused.

"Yes," said the voice, sadly. "Like the song."

And then, from above --

The sound of digging.

 

*

 

In Liesel's experience, the people who come to your door in the middle of the night never bring good news.

"Pretty sure that's for you," her husband mumbled, heavy-mouthed into his pillow. Below, the pounding of a fist on the door resumed, and he took his foot, leveraged it against Liesel's thigh, and shoved until she fell part-way off the mattress. "I'm not the popular one here."

"Eurggh," Liesel responded, very cuttingly.

She gathered up her robe, shoved her cloud of hair back and trapped it under a bandana, and felt her way downstairs in the dark. The motion-activated porchlight threw a silhouette against the curtains, and she knew who it had to be even before she dragged the front door open and saw Walter Kugler on her step.

"Please," he said. He wore his uniform trousers, unbelted and creased like they'd been picked up and thrown on, and a cut-out shirt that had seen better days. His sleepwear, she presumed. "Please, I can't wake him up."

" _Ja,"_ she said, already stepping out and pulling the door shut behind her.

He led her next door, through the dark house, and up the stairs to Max's bedroom. A bedside lamp was on, and the figure illuminated in the sheets was knotted-up, twisted in on himself, and utterly silent like he feared being found, even in the safety of the Victor's Village. The steady tremor that shook at him was the only thing that alerted her something was wrong. It was a tension she could feel, even standing in the doorway.

Liesel spotted Walter's holster looped around the back of a chair, his boots beneath with his Peacekeeper's helmet, and -- more tellingly than that -- his glasses, a stack of books, and a glass of water on the bedside table opposite Max's. 

She swallowed, ignored these things, and hiked up her robe so that she could climb up onto the mattress.

She located Max among the sheets, dug around for his balled-up fighting fist, and pulled it up to her.

She sang to him, because what else are you to do in the face of what frightens you? It beats at you, you sing back. It hurts you, you sing back. Never let it have the power.

He taught her that.

She started with "The Hanging Tree," because it was on her mind, and after a moment, Walter joined in, so the song became a harmony. She worked Max's fist open so that she could wrap her fingers around his, to give him an anchor to use to climb out of his nightmare.

"The Hanging Tree" segued into a hymn from District 6 with a similar tune. Most of the music from District 6 dealt with themes of the sky, of wide-open spaces, of clouds and stars and the colors embedded in the times of day. District 6 specialized in transportation; they built the trains, the tracks, the hovercrafts. It made sense, the way their culture became so focused on unreachable destinations. They were always building the paths, but could never take them.

"You should see the sky tonight, Max," she whispered. "Do you remember how it looked from the Seam, where there were no artificial lights to block it out? On clear nights, it looked like a carpet of stars, remember?"

"I remember," he rasped, now awake. And, "… where was I?"

"Still somewhere we could reach you," she replied.

 

*

 

For the 41st Annual Hunger Games, the arena was an aquarium.

There were four separate chambers, each one featuring a different underwater environment: one was a brightly-lit, sandy coral reef with lots of little fish and poisonous eels; another an open water shelf littered with darting, winking swordfish and blood-scenting sharks and forests of jellyfish and no place to hide; a freezing, pitch-black tank meant to simulate the deep sea trenches and their frightening occupants; and lastly, a kelp forest where tributes could harvest their own food and even cook it over belching-hot vents. The chambers were connected by a series of maintenance tunnels, which could only be entered through pressurized hatches. All tunnels led to a hub in the heart of the arena.

Each tribute that year was fitted with a wet suit, flippers, and an oxygen tank before entering. The oxygen tanks only held air for so long, though, and the only refilling station was, naturally, at the Cornucopia in the hub, as were the only pumps for fresh water.

The District 4 tributes were the favored winners, since the arena was more to their advantage than anyone else's. They were down to the final eight, and both District 4 tributes were still alive, holding a grudging mutual dominion over the coral reef and all of its food sources.

But Liesel had a tribute in the running, too.

A girl, a niece of Tommy Muller's, who allied herself with the District 3 girl to strategically flood the tunnels to cut off the other tributes from readily available food and the Cornucopia. She was the only tribute unafraid of the deep-sea trench chamber, hunkering down with her lamp and her tank among the nightmarish mutt-fish and the squids, waiting for other tributes to come to her.

There were some advantages, Liesel thought, to being from the coal District. You didn't mind the darkness, for one thing.

But she wasn't used to mentoring alone, not for this long (her tributes rarely made it to the final eight,) and it was only Seeder's intervention and gentle insistence that she was no use to her tribute sleep-deprived and delirious that got her out of the command center. By the time she got back to their floor in the Training Center, every part of her dragged. She felt like she was trying to haul sandbags around.

She sank onto the sofa in the main room, only intending to rest and check the Capitol news before heading to bed, but next she woke, it was hours later and the door chimed.

Disoriented, she sat up. The chime sounded again.

"Enter!" she called.

The door slid open and shut, and a moment later, a boy poked his head around corner.

Liesel smiled in surprise. "Hello, Beetee," she said.

In the 40th Games the year before, at the age of fourteen, Beetee broke Liesel's long-standing record as Panem's youngest Victor. He wouldn't hold the title for long: a few years from now, a thirteen-year-old from District 1 named Adamantine would break it, but for right now, Liesel rose to her feet and saw a child Victor, like she had once been.

Beetee returned the smile. 

"Hello, word-shaker," he said. "May I join you?"

"Yes, please, come in," she gestured, scooting over to make room for him on the sofa. "We can watch --" she glanced at the television, and it took her a moment to make sense of what she was seeing. "A cooking challenge, apparently." It rankled at her Seam sensibilities, and she couldn't stop the disgust that crinkled through her voice. "Gross, really?"

"Despicable, isn't it," Beetee agreed mildly. 

They sat together on the sofa. For a moment, he didn't say anything, and then he pushed at his glasses and started, with obvious discomfort, "First, I wanted to say that I'm sorry about your District partner. Have they -- did they declare him dead?"

"Yes," Liesel said shortly.

"My condolences. He was ... kind to me, after my Games. It's a very rare attribute, these days." He cleared his throat. "Second, I have a story for you, if you'd like it."

She sat up straighter. An itch started in her fingertips, and with it, the urge to steal. Liesel never outgrew thievery; everything the Capitol didn't want her to have, she took. She stole music and books, she stole information about Districts that were not her own. In District 1, the population is divided into family clans, which were determined by what precious mineral they farmed. A gemstone is usually placed under a newborn's tongue at birth -- it's considered good luck if they swallow it. In District 10, they tie bells around the necks of lambs, a holdover from a time when wolves were a common threat. They still were, in some places.

"I would love it, Beetee, thank you. From District 3?"

"Yes." He waited until she'd fetched a recorder. It wasn't the ideal location, but Liesel had collected stories under more questionable circumstances than this. "My father used to tell it to us when we were little. It's about a man whose wife got sick. There was a hospital nearby, but the problem was is that there was a mountain separating his village from the city where they'd built the hospital, and the valleys were too treacherous to take on foot. It took a day and a half to go around. His wife wasn't healthy enough for that kind of travel, and the man couldn't afford to make the journey to get her medicine."

District 3 was a small, scrubby District that most people just referred to kind of snidely as the Capitol's armpit. It used to be farmland before desertification set in, and now District 3 generated the Capitol's power and mass-produced its technology.

Where 1, 2, and even 4 developed into Career Districts, 3 never had a chance. You don't raise Panem's smartest children and then let them train with weapons, too.

"After she died, the man vowed that he wouldn't let it happen again. There was no reason his village shouldn't have access to adequate medical care. So one morning, he got up and went up into the mountains. He picked one and started taking it apart, stone by stone. For the next forty years, that's what he did. When he got too old to pull the cart, his son took over. By the time the son had sons of his own, they finally finished. They'd created a flat path between two peaks. A journey that had once taken a day and half now was only a matter of hours. Nobody in the village had to go without medical care ever again."

He stopped, and looked off into some middling distance. Liesel, sensing he wasn't done, waited.

"The idea, I think, is that mountains …" he paused. He met her eyes. He spoke very carefully, "Mountains cannot be taken apart in a single day. The most anyone can do is move a few rocks, to make it easier for those who come next, until the task is complete."

The smile started at one corner of her mouth and spread to the other. 

"I think," she said to the astute fifteen-year-old in front of her. "You might be right about that."

 

*

 

When Liesel married, she married Seam, a coal miner friend of Kurt Steiner's who'd been in the year above her at school.

He whistled on the way to work on sunny mornings, and on the day that Max Vandenburg came up out of his basement with swimming hands, swimming eyes, and skin greyer than wet newspaper and said, simply, like it was the only word he knew, "Liesel," before collapsing face-first into the hearth, he was the first person she encountered when she ran out onto the street, yelling for help. He fetched her a stretcher like the kind they used for mine injuries, and together, they lifted Max onto it, piled him with blankets, and took him to the apothecary's on Merchant Street.

He stayed with her all that night, and when it became plain that Max wasn't going to wake, he coaxed her to let go of Max's hand and go get some rest.

The apothecary assured them that pneumonia was a sick man's friend. In the Capitol, it was easily cured, but here, all they could do was wait. If Max was going to die, it'd carry him off peacefully enough.

For the next two months, while they waited for -- for _something,_ for Max to die or Max to live or for the arrival of medicine from the Capitol that wasn't coming, he visited her at the end of his shift, usually just as she was leaving school. They walked a circuitous route, first to the apothecary's to check on Max's condition (unchanged, until it wasn't, until the day the apothecary's son fetched her from class and she got there, breathless, to find Walter Kugler weeping and Max smiling, their heads pressed together, and joined them with a cry,) then to the market for necessities, then past his home in the Seam to her own.

He'd ask her about her curriculum, and she always sung him a few things until he picked them up. His singing voice wasn't anything extraordinary, but he could whistle everything she gave him, note-for-note.

"I think all the birds have stopped to listen to us," he told her once, with a grin that folded at his eyes. "Do you hear anything?"

And Liesel, for once, could find nothing to say at all.

He made her feel like she was stumbling, even when she had both feet on the ground.

They married in May, on the ten-year anniversary of her own Games. She rented a white dress that zipped all the way up the back of her neck -- she liked the idea that after the threshold ceremony, after the toasting, she would need her husband's help to get out of it again.

It came as a surprise to some people, she knew that. After all, she and Rudy had been a foregone conclusion in everyone's minds, a matter not helped by their very public end. A boy and a girl, best friends since childhood? They were destined to marry, don't be silly, who else could there possibly be?

Liesel thought that was an awful lot of expectation to put on a pair of fifteen-year-olds. Who was thinking about marriage at that age?

And anyway, she couldn't ask Rudy, because the Capitol killed him for sport. Franz Deutcher skewered him in the mud, and let him bleed to death in Liesel's arms.

She'd kissed his corpse good-bye.

It took them a couple years to come around to the idea, but when they did, she and her husband decided in a fit of strange euphoria that they might as well have a dozen children. A whole village, why not? She had the money to feed them, and if the foreman could spare him, he could care for them while she was mentoring in the Capitol. Liesel warned him that they'd need to have them very close together. They'd lose a couple to the Reaping, it was inevitable -- it had already happened to the Victor from the 3rd Hunger Games (not Victorie Heavensbee, who'd had the wherewithal to leave Plutarch with his father in the Capitol, out of harm's way, or Max Vandenburg, who didn't dare reproduce) and the ratings from those Games had been way too high for it to never happen again. The sooner they could get them grown, the better.

In the end, though, they just had three. 

All boys.

Of them, only one made it to adulthood.

 

*

 

Liesel Meminger raised her children like Careers.

She had to. They had no way of getting the skills to survive in the arena otherwise, and there was no doubt in her mind that they'd need them.

She disguised it as play. She sent her boys after each other in the yard, armed with arrows with cushioned tips that had been coated in coal dust, making each hit they scored on each other plain and visible. She encouraged their habit of throwing pencils at each other, and gave them hints on how to make a mark even with a long-distance throw -- a skill that would translate easily to knives, later. She taught them to swim and to chop firewood that they sold in the Seam for far, far less than it was worth. She taught them to identify a variety of edible plants that grew wild, all the dandelions and blackberries, all the katniss tubers and spring onions.

"It's too bad there's no way to predict when the electricity on the perimeter fence is going to fail," her husband mused, lacing up his boots one morning. "Otherwise we could take them into the woods to hunt. It wouldn't hurt."

"Don't be stupid," Liesel returned, startled. "That's illegal."

He just gave her an amused look, and kissed her on the way out the door, already whistling.

When their eldest son turned twelve, his name went into the Reaping for the first time.

It was, of course, drawn, and no amount of training, no amount of preparation, no amount of sponsorship could save a twelve-year-old who went into the Hunger Games. It was the cruelest and most despicable part of an already cruel, despicable system.

The Capitol audience loved every minute.

 

*

 

A girl named Seeder from District 11 won the very next year, and when Liesel returned home after doing her Capitol-mandated concerts, celebrity appearances, and signings (because why should the Capitol care if she was grieving, if she still woke up some mornings in a state of renewed shock, roaming her house, convinced she could hear him calling for her? Her son's death was _so_ last year, get over it,) she found out she had news. 

She was forty-one years old. Both her boys were in the ground, one from the Games, one from pox, because if you were District and the Games didn't kill you, something else would. She was too old for this, she thought.

She didn't sleep well, trying to plan what she would say to her loved ones, and the third night of her return to District 12 found her in her kitchen at one in the morning, cracking nuts into a bowl.

Nibbling at the soft meat inside gave her something to do, and then, outside her kitchen door -- a scuffle of feet and an urgent knock.

_No,_ she thought, closing her eyes. Nothing ever good came from a knock on your door in the dead of night.

She composed herself and rose, answering it.

Max Vandenburg stood there, in his sturdiest coat and boots. A rucksack clung to his shoulder like a pleading friend, and in the gloom, his eyes appeared to be pits of dark color in his face. Walter Kugler was with him, dressed in Seam clothes and also carrying a sack slung across his back. The only visibly Peacekeeper-ish thing about him was his gun, holstered at his hip as it always was.

"Come on, it's time," said Max, unnecessarily. He spoke lowly, handing his voice out only as far as it needed to go. "It's now or never."

"The electricity to the perimeter fence will be down for at least an hour of maintenance," Walter volunteered from behind Max's shoulder. "And we don't know when the next window of opportunity will be, so we need to go now."

Liesel nodded numbly.

When she didn't move, Max pressed forward. "Come _on,_ Liesel, get dressed, get your things. Your husband said you were ready."

They were. This moment was the culmination of weeks, if not years, of observation and planning, from the moment one of them said "what if" and somebody else said "why not?" Liesel and her husband didn't have to stay in 12 anymore, not now that their children were buried, and Max refused to leave without them.

"Max …" she started, weak with it, and Max Vandenburg, who knew her better than anyone else left alive, immediately shook his head.

" _No,"_ came leaking out of him. Hairline fractures damaged his voice, and he started shivering on her step. "No, Liesel. We have to go. We have to leave now."

"I _can't."_

"Yes, you can, _please."_

"I'm pregnant again, Max." His eyes snapped shut, caught in a trap and fatally wounded. "And I -- I -- I can't deliver a baby in the wilderness, you know that, so. So just _go,_ and be careful, and -- live well, okay? Please, please do that. Live well, and --"

He didn't let her finish.

He grabbed her by the arms, pulling her into him. She lashed her arms around his back, clutching him tightly to her, and they barely held each other up, shaking at the knees. She buried her face against his neck, her nose pressed up underneath the feathery bits of his greying hair, suddenly fifteen again and newly lifted out of the arena. They'd hugged like this then, too, hugged and cried and collapsed to the floor of the hovercraft that took them back to the Capitol. Max Vandenburg and his Victor, his only Victor.

After a long moment, he pulled back. He kissed her, very hard, square in the center of her forehead.

She closed her eyes, and salt water came free from their corners, tearing her face in two.

Then Walter Kugler stepped forward. He touched Max's shoulder, pulled at his coat until he released her with a horrible, agonized noise like she was skin coming off. He took Max's hand in his own.

"Come on," he said, so very gently, pulling again. His eyes grabbed Liesel up, and she nodded back.

Then they were off her step and tracking back through the spaces between the houses. She watched their shapes smudge into the darkness until she could no longer see them, and picked herself up. On coltish, unsteady legs, she tore through the kitchen, the front room, reaching the front window and ripping the curtains aside.

At the end of the lane, in the shadow of the house whose basement he'd made his refuge, Max Vandenburg stopped.

He turned, finding her in the window for one last hard grip of the eyes.

She touched the middle three fingers of her left hand to her lips, and lifted them in farewell. When her hand dropped back down to her side, they were gone, and Liesel Meminger let the motion carry her to the floor. She cried until she thought her ribs would come apart into a thousand pieces and leave her spread out and dripping on the carpet. When her husband came downstairs, he found her like that.

 

*

 

She never saw Max again.

The Capitol took her into custody and questioned her, of course, but she was just some tiny, toothless Victor from 12. What did she know?

A few weeks later, when Max had officially been missing for too long and the Capitol verged on appearing incompetent, they cobbled together some story and announced the very unfortunate, very gruesome death of Max Vandenburg, so that he might be an example. They showed footage of a hovercraft bearing down on the wilderness treetops, a figure running full-pelt below, and the harpoon that speared him against the ground like an insect on a collection board.

Whoever it was, it wasn't Max, although Liesel was pretty sure she was the only one who could tell you that.

They'd never find him. After all, hiding was his greatest talent.

The punishment for District 12 came later, in a different form.

After careful consideration, the committee of Gamemakers decided that because Max Vandenburg was originally born in District 2, and was Reaped so shortly after his immigration to 12, that his victory didn't really count as a victory for 12 at all. When Liesel checked later, though, she found that he wasn't counted among the District 2 Victors, either. He simply … went missing.

And so, quietly, bloodlessly, Max Vandenburg was erased from Panem's history.

Ask anyone, and they'll tell you that yeah, sure, District 12's only ever had two Victors: Liesel Meminger and Haymitch Abernathy.

Well, prior to the 74th Hunger Games, at least.

But that's another story.

 

*

 

Long before Liesel was much of anything, she was this: 

A Seam-colored girl with mixed-race hair, who lived with her mama and her papa in a house next to the Holtzapfel's, where coal dust grimed along the edges of everything and everybody was too poor to notice how poor they were unless someone was actively bringing it to their attention. She liked to steal and dreamed of someday being able to read well enough to leave the midget class. When her Papa came home from the mines, he'd wait for her to wake from her nightmare and they'd read together, him drowsing over a cigarette and her stumbling over phrases like _the Districts must pay war reparations_ and _the proper maintenance of your equipment is of upmost importance to your gravedigging career._

She had a best friend. His name was Rudy Steiner, and he was merchant -- but the good kind, the kind that knew how to starve with the rest of them.

On nice days, and even on days when the rain came down streaked and coal-colored, they'd walk home the long way along the perimeter fence.

They walked the whole length of District 12 that way, Rudy periodically picking up little stones or sticks and throwing them at the fence to watch it spark and flash. Testing for weakness, he said.

"What do you suppose is out there?" he asked her once, squatting down and peering through the gaps in the wire. "Do you think we'll ever get to see it?"

"Don't be stupid," said Liesel, but Rudy never let it drop.

"There's got to be a way to get out," he told her, firmly, testing another section. "And I'm going to find it, and then I'll take off. I'm faster than any of the boys in my class, they'll never catch me!"

As they grew, they started being able to put names to the things that existed outside the fence. Along the stinking ravine that ran behind the Hob, they pointed and agreed that District 11 must be that way, because look, you could see the land getting flatter. They skirted around the train station, jumping-jack over the tracks: if you went that way, you'd reach Districts 8 and 9, where they took the coal. You could even see the belching smokestacks if you looked hard enough! (You couldn't.) Closest to Liesel's home in the Seam, in the Meadow, Rudy excitedly pointed out bits of the fence that were starting to corrode.

"There'll be a hole someday!" he exclaimed.

"The fence will still electrocute you if you try to squeeze through," Liesel pointed out, and ignored the sour look he threw her. Anyway, the only thing that could exist beyond the fence in _that_ direction was wilderness.

One day, when they were both about thirteen, they were sitting on some rocks on the edge of the Meadow. Liesel had her homework cracked open over her knees, brushing the ants off her legs. Rudy stood off to one side, calling tips to Tommy Muller, who had possession of the ball and was trying to keep it away from the combined effort of their sisters. Since Tommy's damaged hearing kept him from noticing almost everything except Rosa Hubermann and most sirens, this was completely useless.

Then, suddenly, he was next to her.

"Hey!" His fingers jabbed at her ribs, but he retracted them quickly, before she could snatch them up and bend them back until he yelled uncle. "Look!"

Liesel looked.

A flock of birds had just settled in the white, budding branches of a nearby yearling. They were small, about cardinal-sized, with black-and-white plumage and pointed crests that looked a lot like Rudy's hair when he tried slicking it up with water.

"Are those jabberjays?"

She looked again. One of the birds looked back at her beadily.

She said, "They look like mockingbirds to me."

Rudy contemplated it. Then he shot her a grin. "Only one way to find out!"

"Rudy!" She scrambled to her feet, shoving her homework to the side and hurrying after him.

He strode right up to the tree and peered up into the branches. The birds, either unused to human interference or undaunted by it, peered right back. She hissed at him, but he just ignored her, turning his head this way and that, before announcing loudly and with great delight, "All is _shit."_

" _Rudy!"_

But the birds didn't do anything with the offering. One chirruped back at him, and then with disinterested flips of their tails, a couple took off and several others hopped up higher into the branches.

Rudy, desperate not to lose his audience, started crooning at them in a singsong voice, like he did sometimes with his baby sister to keep her from fussing while he changed her drawers. "All is shit, all is shit, no, come back, you stu _uuuu_ pid animals, come back and repeat what I'm saying."

To her surprise, this worked better. Two birds flitted down to the branch directly above their heads and whistled a wordless, but otherwise perfect mimicry of Rudy's two-tone chorus.

He flashed her a triumphant grin.

"I still don't think they're jabberjays," Liesel said peevishly. "Jabberjays can repeat whole conversations. Besides, they should have all died out by now, remember?"

"Well, you're right, too," Rudy allowed, magnanimous in his victory. "See, they've got mockingbird coloring, so maybe they're mockingbirds, too. Hey!" He jabbed again at her ribs, lightly this time. "Maybe they're mixed, kind of like you!"

"Rudy!"

"No, really. Sing them something, Liesel! You're a lot better at it than me."

This was the first Liesel'd ever heard of it. She looked at Rudy incredulously, expecting him to be mocking her, but he wasn't. He shoved at her shoulder, gesturing with eagerness up at the waiting birds, who were watching the exchange curiously.

So Liesel looked up at their audience and dredged through her mind for something to offer them. She didn't have much, just some things Papa played a lot that he taught her the words to, and then some of the stuff they learned in school, like the alphabet song and the mining song. So she took a page from Rudy's book and picked some chant that Ludwig Schmiekl and his miserable gang shouted on the schoolyard a lot, fitting it to the tune of the alphabet song.

It took some concentration, so it wasn't until Rudy gripped her elbow, shaking it a little with joy, that she noticed the collection of birds above their heads had grown enormously.

" _Look,"_ Rudy whispered in wonder. "They've all stopped to listen to you."

 

*

 

On the very last day, she stood alone on the gravel road outside the house in the Seam that had once belonged to the Hubermanns.

The wind bit through her clothes, and she wrapped her arms tightly around herself, like she needed to keep her ribs pinned in place.

Almost fifty years ago, a woman from the community home led her through that door so she could meet her new parents. Somebody replaced the roof at some point, and a chicken coop now hunkered up against the side of the house, where the earth was stirred up into mud by the traffic to-and-from the water pump. The council reallocated the house for a young couple after her parents' death, and that young couple had given way to another young couple.

The owner arrived while Liesel was still standing there.

A miner with two missing fingers and a long black braid wound up into a knot at the base of her neck, she swiped at her dirty forehead underneath her helmet and gave Liesel a curious look. Her lunch pail banged against her hip, rattling and empty.

"Is everything all right, Mrs. Everdeen?" she called.

Liesel smiled. "Meminger, please. I never took my husband's name. And yes, everything's fine, thank you."

She turned away and walked on, down to the end of the lane and beyond, out into the Meadow. As she made her way along the fence, following the curve it made back towards the mines, the warehouses, and the other official buildings, the sun sank behind the hills.

At the end of the day, the only thing the Peacekeepers who controlled the District 12 power station were thinking of was the food that would be waiting for them when they got home. Some might even stop at the Hob for fresher fair -- wild dog and turnip soup from young Greasy Sae, perhaps -- and so nobody paid Liesel any mind as she loitered around the entrance. One man smiled at her and wished her good night. His son played the fiddle in Liesel's music class.

She slipped inside before the night crew settled into their routine.

Beetee had lent her a book the last time they were both in the Capitol. The book itself now safely resided in Ilsa Hermann's library, along with everything else Liesel'd stolen, but the relevant chapters were seared onto her memory.

Namely, the parts on electrical grids.

_Mountains cannot be taken apart in a single day._

District 12 didn't have much in the way of security, especially not around here. What'd be the point?

_The most you can do is move a few rocks, and make it easier for whoever comes next._

Liesel found it, visibly labeled with the words "Perimeter Fence". The grid spread upwards, a complicated and tightly-woven collection of flips, switches, and colored lights. It branched out towards the top, where connecting lines ran to other grids.

It looked, she thought with some surprise, like a tree.

A voice, unbidden, rose from her memory.

_When the time comes, call me to the tree._

An indistinct noise behind her brought her attention back to the task at hand, and she focused, removing from beneath her smock a pair of pliers and a small blowtorch.

The plan relied on two very important elements.

One, it relied on just how much the Capitol _didn't_ care about District 12 -- the smallest, poorest, and most unimpressive of its Districts. Once she'd sabotaged the flow of electricity to the perimeter fence beyond easy repair, it relied on the Capitol being much more concerned about spending its money on important things, like entertainment for its citizens, rather than some power problem in District 12.

Two, it relied on the curiosity and desperation of children like Rudy Steiner, who'd looked out at the wilderness and saw nothing but potential.

If the mountain was going to be taken apart, then the children who came next could not look at a fence and see a cage.

Liesel Meminger, of course, would not survive to see it. She probably wouldn't even escape this building. Peacekeepers were trained to be a very trigger-happy bunch, and she was lucky that she got to know Walter Kugler, who liked being the exception to the emblem on his sleeve. Johann Hermann had a point: you're always learning and unlearning, when it comes to people.

Without stopping, she considered what came next.

A bullet to the back of her head would be nice. It'd be a lot less gruesome than some of the ends her tributes had faced.

She wasn't afraid, not really. Her husband was already safely at rest, six feet beneath the earth with their other children, from the lung disease that got everyone in District 12 eventually. There were no medicated patches for coal miners. Her youngest son was almost of age, and once she was dead and there was no one left to punish publicly, it was unlikely he'd be drawn at the Reaping.

And Haymitch …

Well, Haymitch wasn't happy with her, but he hadn't tried to stop her when she said good-bye. He hadn't even asked what she thought she was doing, but he probably didn't have to. He was one of the sharpest kids she'd ever mentored, and Mags and Woof, Seeder and Chaff -- they'd help him out after she was gone. 

She smiled. After all this time, Liesel Meminger finally had a Victor. 

Her only one.

 

*

 

When she was done, a familiar voice spoke.

"Hello, book thief."

Liesel nodded with satisfaction, and turned to meet what was coming.

 

*

 

Many years from now, in the same clearing where Hans Hubermann used to sit and play the accordion for Liesel and Rudy, where the mockingjays had once all stopped to listen to Liesel sing, there in the grass amidst all the wildflowers will be a grey-eyed son of hers, a coal miner who whistled and would sneak through a hole in the fence on Sundays with the bow his mother trained him to use.

With him will be the apothecary's daughter, a blonde-haired Steiner girl with clever sewing hands, and with great courage, she will touch her fingers to the back of his wrist. 

This will be the year they turn nineteen, and they'll be safe from the Reaping.

And when he sings, all the birds will stop to listen.

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
